America’s Problem Isn’t Immigration… America’s Problem Is White Supremacy

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The USA appears to be destined by Providence to plague [the continent of] America with misery in the name of liberty.

Simón Bolívar

These words of the great 19th-century Latin American emancipator accurately describe the relationship between the USA and Latin America to this day. It’s why the punitive treatment by the Trump Administration of migrants attempting to cross the border from Mexico into the USA constitutes a double injustice.

The first injustice is the role that Washington plays and played in destabilising and impoverishing the economies of Latin American states over generations, while subverting and helping to bring down those governments south of the border that dares attempt to unshackle their countries from the chains of US imperialism, in process of which rampant crime, corruption, and violence prosper. The second injustice is the dehumanisation and demonisation meted out to the victims of the ensuing instability and social and economic dislocation wrought when in a state of extremis they flee their homes for sanctuary across the border with their families. Under no moral code can you justify or defend the forced separation of children, including infants, from their parents… none whatsoever. We saw this in the justifiable outcry unleashed in response, which eventually forced Trump to rescind the policy. However, this being said, the nauseating hypocrisy of liberals excoriating the president over the policy of separating children at the border with Mexico has been near impossible to bear. The likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, people who when they weren’t responsible for the mass slaughter of children in the Middle East with their régime-change wars, have, in the case of Clinton, supported mass incarceration in the USA itself, involving the forced separation of families, such people have absolutely no right to take any moral high ground on this issue.

Focusing on the whys and wherefores of mass migration, it’s incumbent on those who are serious about grasping the issue at its roots to identify its causes, rather than continue to deal with its symptoms, and thereby only succeed in creating more causes. In so doing we come to the role of US imperialism in sowing uneven and combined development throughout the Americas. Putting it another way, the development and wealth of the USA were contingent on the underdevelopment and poverty of Latin America… the former impossible without the latter. As Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano pointed up in his classic work Open Veins of Latin America:

Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence. Latin America’s underdevelopment arises from external [European and US] development and continues to feed it. The strength of the imperialist system as a whole rests on the inequality of its parts.

No leader of a Latin or Central American country defied and resisted the juggernaut of US imperialism more than Fidel Castro did. Of the countless speeches he gave during his time at the helm of Cuban politics and society, The Second Declaration of Havana (1962), is among the most powerful:

Since the end of World War II, the countries of Latin America have become more and more impoverished. Their exports have less and less value, their imports cost more. The per capita income falls, the frightful rate of infant mortality doesn’t decrease. The number of illiterates is higher; the people lack jobs, land, adequate housing, schools, hospitals, means of communication, and means of life. Latin America is the provider of cheap raw materials and the buyer of expensive finished articles.

Lest anyone believe that Castro’s views of the relationship between North and South America in the early 1960s bear no relation to the same relationship today, consider, if you will, the plight of Honduras. According to Human Rights Watch, the Central American country in 2018 has violent crime, corruption, and political repression. Meanwhile, according to the World Bank, over 6o percent of its people live in poverty. What we shouldn’t forget is that in 2009 the army toppled the country’s democratically elected leftist President, Manuel Zelaya, in a coup sanctioned by the Honduran Supreme Court and supported by the Obama Administration. As Stephen Zunes reminded us in a 2016 article:

During his [Zelaya’s] tenure, he raised the minimum wage and provided free school lunches, milk for young children, pensions for the elderly, and additional scholarships for students. He built new schools, subsidised public transportation, and even distributed energy-saving light bulbs. None of these was particularly radical, but it was nevertheless disturbing to the country’s wealthy economic and military élites. More frightening was that Zelaya sought to organise an assembly to replace the 1982 constitution written during the waning days of the US-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz García.

With this sorry fate of the country in mind, is it any accident that the number of illegal Honduran migrants into the USA across the Mexican border spiked in recent years? At this juncture, I feel obliged to make a confession. Back in the early to mid-1990s, I was an illegal immigrant living in the USA. However, unlike those crossing the border from Mexico, I wasn’t fleeing natural disaster, grinding poverty, political repression, or a society plagued by crime and violence. I instead had travelled to the USA compelled to do so by nothing more than personal ambition, succumbing to the myth of the American Dream, which as the saying goes is a dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. Anyway, I spent five years in LA as part of the British expat community in Santa Monica, replete with its British pubs, shops, and all the rest, rubbing shoulders and working alongside many other Brits who lived there illegally, many of them having done so for a long time. I worked, paid tax, and was able to exist as if completely legal.

Of course, the difference boils down to the fact that I, and we, happened to be white Europeans, and thus accorded the unwritten but nonetheless obvious privileges white skin affords you in the land of the free. This, ultimately, brings us to the heart of the matter. America’s problem isn’t immigration, its white supremacy. Whether conscious or unconscious, it matters not. The result is brutal treatment meted out to people of colour, migrant and non-migrant alike.

25 June 2018

John Wight

Sputnik International

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201806251065767940-us-problem-not-immigration/

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Top Pope Ally Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga urges Vatican Doctrine Chief Müller to Loosen Up

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On Monday, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, an influential aide to Pope Francisco Bergoglio, criticised Vatican doctrinal watchdog Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller and urged the conservative prelate to be more flexible about reforms being discussed in the Catholic Church. Rodríguez, the head of a “kitchen cabinet” the pope created to draw up reform proposals, said that Müller… who opposes any loosening of church rules on divorce… was a classic German theology professor who thought too much in rigid black-and-white terms. In a rare public criticism amongst senior church figures, Rodríguez rhetorically addressed Müller in an interview with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, saying, “The world isn’t like that, my brother. You should be more flexible when you hear other voices, so you don’t just listen and say, ‘Here’s the wall'”. Rodríguez, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa in Honduras, didn’t cite any possible reforms in particular, but said the pope’s critics, such as those upset by his attacks on capitalism, were “people who don’t understand reality”.

Former Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger picked Müller in 2012 to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the successor office to the Inquisition. Benedict ran that office as the powerful and feared guardian of Church orthodoxy for 24 years as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, until his election as pope in 2005. However, its influence waned under Francisco, who soon after his March 2013 election reportedly told visiting Latin American priests and nuns not to worry if the CDF wrote to them criticising what they were doing.

In an article in the Vatican daily last October, Müller firmly rejected growing demands for the Catholic Church to reinstate divorced and remarried Catholics as full members of the Church. At present, the Catholic Church excludes Catholics who divorce and remarry in a civil ceremony from communion because the Catholic Church teaches that Christ declared marriage an indissoluble bond. With divorce on the rise, more Catholics are asking Rome to show mercy for them. German bishops have been in the forefront of reform thinking and one archdiocese even published guidelines on how to readmit them, which prompted Müller’s article. The Vatican is due to consider reforming its rules on divorce at a worldwide synod of bishops next October.

Müller also strongly defended Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, who reaped stiff criticism from German Catholics, earning the title “luxury bishop” in the media after it came out that he spent at least 30 million Euros (1.38 billion Roubles. 40.7 million USD. 45 million CAD. 46 million AUD. 24.5 million UK Pounds) on a new residential complex. Tebartz-van Elst’s grand plans were so far from the modest approach favoured by the Argentine-born pontiff that Rome sent an envoy to inspect his diocese and later sent him off to a monastery for a leave of absence pending a final decision. Rodríguez didn’t think Tebartz-van Elst would return as Bishop of Limburg and said that Latin Americans like himself and the pope found it hard to understand spending so much money for opulent features such as a 15,000-Euro (690,000 Roubles. 20,350 USD. 22,500 CAD. 23,000 AUD. 12,250 UK Pounds) free-standing bathtub, dryly observing, “For most people, a shower and a toilet are enough. They’re enough for the pope in his three-room apartment, too”.

20 January 2014

Tom Heneghan

Reuters

http://news.yahoo.com/top-pope-ally-urges-vatican-doctrine-chief-loosen-205104072–sector.html

Editor’s Note:

George Weigel is having conniptions, isn’t he? Boo-hoo! He and all the other righties are shown up to be “cafeteria Catholics” (they’re going to pick n’ choose what they’re going to believe… what a scream! They truly don’t like it when we turn their own wacko verbiage against them… watch ‘em squirm!). Francisco is turning out to be a real Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I). Only this time, he didn’t die after a VERY short reign. As for me, I believe that Luciani died a very natural death, as his health wasn’t the best. I don’t favour conspiracy theories… sometimes, shit just happens, and there’s no cabal behind it (although the Curia IS a snake-pit full of ambitious and unscrupulous SOBs, to be sure… just as our First Families are, to be frank). Conspiracy theorists bore me… they should get lives… that’d take up their time, wouldn’t it?

BMD